


From the Mouth of a Broken Head

by VeteranKlaus



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [11]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Blood and Gore, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:10:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23859580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeteranKlaus/pseuds/VeteranKlaus
Summary: No one had ever believed Klaus about Ben, and really, they had a point. Klaus isn't supposed to see ghosts when he is high, and yet there is the corpse of his brother. Maybe they were right. Maybe it wasn't Ben's ghost.
Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1385572
Comments: 22
Kudos: 218





	From the Mouth of a Broken Head

**Author's Note:**

> Bad things happen prompt: hallucinations.

Ben dies when they are nineteen years old.

Klaus is high when he dies, of course. He is never not high these days, and this dealer he buys from just gives him such amazing drugs that he can’t help himself. It doesn’t matter that Klaus knows it is most definitely not pure, and that he is most definitely being given something much stronger than he is asking for, but he doesn’t mind at all. He needs it; deserves it, really.

The academy is empty beside him, Luther and Ben. Allison left just under a year ago, and Diego before her, and Vanya before him. Klaus would leave, but the academy is four walls and a roof above his head, a comfortable bed for him to collapse in, and full of little ornaments and trophies that get him a pretty penny. He doesn’t stay there every night, anyway – he goes out, he pops a pill or sniffs some powder or crushes up some crystals, and he ends up talking to a person beneath the flashing lights of the club he snuck into, or in the bathroom of the house party he let himself into, and he ends up going back home with them.

Reginald is bearable when he is high. Reginald has not made him go on a mission since he was almost eighteen anyway. He’s given up, save for the occasional times he chooses to voice his utter disgust in Klaus, but thing is; it’s hilarious when Klaus is high. The amusement is probably just blossoming from a place of anger and resentment, and where Allison might throw a tantrum and Diego might throw a fist and Luther might tower a little taller, Klaus laughs. He laughs his way through arguments and fights and laughs when Reginald backhands him, because it’s so funny and he isn’t sure what he’ll do if he doesn’t laugh.

Luther has taken to side-eying him with a growing look of disgust similar to Reginald’s, and Ben has taken to frowning when Klaus’ high becomes the not-so-fun ones; when, instead of being funny and entertaining, he watches Klaus climb through his window with smudged eyeliner and new bruises; when, instead of saying funny things and being funny to watch, all Klaus can manage to do is stare at nothing and not move an inch, or when he chokes on his own breath – when he can breathe, that is.

The academy is tense – even Klaus, high as hell, manages to notice it. Reginald’s little army has fallen apart and Klaus laughs in his face whenever he can. The Umbrella Academy is hardly a thing anymore, yet he still tries to exert his control over the remaining valuable members.

Save for Pogo and Grace, the academy is empty when he wakes up that day, sprawled across his bedroom floor in his underwear, one wrist still in his shirt that he didn’t manage to fully pull off. He has no memory of falling asleep, but he probably needed it – whatever is in the drug he’s been buying, it has him up for days at a time. The crash was inevitable.

So, peeling himself off the floor, he scrubs at his eyes and tries to ignore the pit in his stomach and heaviness in his limbs that accompanies not being high these days – it feels as if all the life has been sucked out of him, leaving him bitter and depressed and desperate for more. It isn’t as big a problem as Ben thinks it is, though. He just needs a little pick-me-up to and he will be normal. He chases that feeling away by yanking a plastic baggie from the pocket of his pants on the floor nearby, fishing out a little mix of pills and throwing the back with ease that keeps getting easier, now. He can manage four at a time dry.

He throws clothes on and drags himself down to the kitchen, and the empty sight in front of him reminds him something – Luther and Ben are out, today. Some mission in a museum. Klaus had begged Ben to stop going on those stupid things, to stop letting Luther fill his head with Reginald’s lies, but Ben and his powers are an odd situation. He knows Ben is terrified of losing control; he denied Diego’s request for him to leave the academy with him, and Klaus’ too, claiming he couldn’t risk it. The Horror, though Ben had a tight hold on them, were their own being and no one would ever understand what it was like to have them, to try and control them when they didn’t want to be controlled.

So, alone and feeling the beginning of his pills kick in, making him have to pause and close his eyes to revel in the slow build up, Klaus helps himself to the food in the refrigerator. By the time he has sat down with a variety of food, the crying ghosts have disappeared and the house is silent and he wiggles his fingers and his toes in the air and crushes food between his teeth and laughs at the way his body feels. How can drugs ever be bad when it brings him peace and makes him feel any kind of way he wants to feel? If he wants to be happy, he knows that happiness is only a handful of notes away. If he wants to sleep for hours, he can get a good rest with a few pills. If he wants to forget about everything, it is oh so easy to. And he can leave all the ghosts behind. Luther and Diego and Ben and everyone have it wrong. He does have a problem, but his problem has never been drugs; drugs are the _solution_. It’s the bloody, screaming corpses that are the problem.

He slides off the table and takes three tries to position a glass correctly under a carton of apple juice to catch it, and then he washes his food down and turns around and-

Stops.

The first thing he notices is the blood. Oh, so much blood; it covers this person entirely, makes them just a being composed out of rushing, gushing blood. It pools on the floor, stains the tiles, and spreads ever outwards.

Klaus stops on the spot, and the glass of apple juice drops from his hand in shock. He hardly notices the feel of it on his toes, or the sound of glass shattering outwards. He scrutinises the form, then drags his hands down his face and rubs his eyes. He shouldn’t see ghosts, so he must be hallucinating – he didn’t think what he took was a hallucinogenic, though. Nonetheless, when he drops his hands from his eyes, it is still there.

“Oh, fuck,” Klaus mutters, beginning to tip-toe carefully around it, giving it a wide berth. This must be some hallucination from his drugs. He’s too high to see any ghosts, and this ghost isn’t special. This ghost doesn’t get to break through his shield of drugs to harass him.

Klaus gets a few steps aside before the bloody mass begins to move. As he does so, Klaus grimaces as what he thinks to be an intestine – part of an intestine? – falls onto the ground with a sickening squelch. Trembling hands lift into the air slowly, as if being weighed down, and then they settle onto where Klaus guesses is supposed to be the person’s stomach. It is horrifically concave. Klaus tries not to look too closely at it; stares only in very brief glimpses from the corner of his eyes. It doesn’t seem to have noticed him yet – it must have only just died, and not yet realised what has become of itself – and he takes the opportunity to try and slip around it and out of the kitchen before it can latch onto him, if this truly is a ghost.

As he gets to the doorway, he turns to risk glancing at it. It still has its back to him, thankfully, but that gives Klaus a chance to see it better; the front of it is covered in blood, there is slightly less on the back, which shows Klaus a latex suit tailored to its body, with slight ridges, and it reminds Klaus suddenly of the suits he and his siblings used to wear on serious missions.

The longer he looks, however, the more a growing sense of familiarity rises in him. The height of the mass is familiar; the clothing familiar; the dark hair familiar. It is on the tip of his tongue; puzzles of a piece missing one single, crucial piece just out of his reach.

The hands move from their stomach, hovering in the air before themselves as they eye the trembling of them, and then the hands raise to their face, wiping blood away so they can open their eyes to see. They look around the place slowly and Klaus tenses, slipping a step backwards, but he finds he cannot make himself move much further than that.

Slowly, so slowly, the person spins around, and Klaus holds his breath. A blood-stained face turns to meet his, and trembling hands lift the mask from his eyes, and Ben stares right at Klaus.

“ _Ben_?” Klaus breathes, air expelling from his lungs as if he has been punched, and Ben just stares at Klaus and then slowly drops his gaze to his stomach, torn and bloody and gruesome. On shaking legs, Klaus stumbles forwards on step at a time, forcing his muscles to move, until he is face to face with Ben.

“Klaus, dear? Oh, you’ve made a mess, look at the glass-“

He can hear Grace as her heels click on tiles, coming close and fussing, but he ignores her. Instead, he lifts a hand, and Ben says, “Klaus?” and his hand reaches out for his shoulder and it goes through him. Ben turns misty-blue like fog, rippling where Klaus’ hand goes through him, and ice floods his hand.

Ben’s breath hitches, and Klaus snaps his hand back to his chest as if he has been burned, and they stare at one another.

And then Klaus screams.

He stumbles back, wailing, and he cannot take his eyes from his brother, and Grace cannot console him. Pogo comes as quickly as he can, too, curious and maybe even worried, and all he sees is Klaus staring at the air, backed into a corner, screaming over Grace, with blood staining the tiles from the cuts on his feet and his eyes wide, his pupils wider.

Ten minutes later and Klaus is alone, hyperventilating on the floor, as Grace and Pogo hurry after Luther, who had kicked one of the doors off its hinges in his rush to get inside, carrying a bloody, torn body.

Of course they can’t save him. He’s been torn apart from the inside out. Half of his organs are painted across the museum walls. The Horrors took control and Ben couldn’t get it back, and they wouldn’t stop until they had just – just torn his brother apart.

The funeral is two days later. Everyone comes for it. Klaus hasn’t slept since Ben’s death, nor has he been sober since. With a little higher dose than usual, he can make the grisly corpse of his brother little more than a shadow and a whisper, and Ben stays far behind him. It’s bearable, just. Usually he wouldn’t like to be so high consistently – he prefers a mellow level he can still function on, and this is toeing that line – but at least it helps him ignore the disgusted looks he gets from everyone during the funeral. Of course Klaus would be off his face at Ben’s funeral.

Afterwards, he grabs Diego, and he tells him everything.

“I – I saw him, I swear I saw him, just before Luther came home. I saw his ghost, and maybe I could talk to him?”

Diego stares at him for several agonisingly long moments, face conflicted, tear tracks on his cheeks. “You’re high, Klaus,” he says, voice teetering between broken and angry. “You’re fucking high. You can’t see shit.” He shrugs Klaus’ hand off him, jaw clenched, and Klaus waves his hands.

“I know, I know, but Diego – you didn’t-“ He pauses, swallowing, eyes flitting aside to the shadow in behind him, standing in a puddle of blood. “You didn’t see when Luther brought him here. I can’t – I can’t see that again, but maybe – I could talk to him, he’s here-“

Diego stares, then shakes his head slowly. When he blinks, another tear rolls down his cheek. “You’re fucking high at his funeral, Klaus,” is all he says, hurt and insulted and angry and rightfully so, Klaus thinks, in his perspective because he doesn’t understand where Klaus is coming from, what it’s like.

Klaus walks away, then. He does feel bad for it; of course he does; he doesn’t want to be high at his brother’s funeral, but he cannot stand and listen to his siblings talk about Ben while he sees his corpse standing with them, whispering quiet pleads for Klaus to help him, that he’s scared, so scared and confused and _Klaus please help_ -

He breathes shakily, dragging a hand down his wet face.

So Klaus gets sober, that night, determined to talk to his brother.

By the next night, he’s high again, trying to forget the image of his brother’s guts spilling across his bedroom floor as he cries.

He tries to talk to his siblings about it. He does, really. But he’s never quite sober enough for them, and following his death they are short tempered with him – with everyone, to be fair. Vanya gets into a lot of arguments during this time. Diego does, Luther does, Allison does, Klaus does. They all start arguments, they all pick fights. Diego blames Luther and Reginald, Luther blames him and Klaus for not being there – never Allison. Allison was out living her life, taking golden opportunities (even if she created those opportunities herself) while Diego had betrayed the Academy, the family, and Klaus was a disappointment and weak.

Klaus is mad with himself too, though. He doesn’t know what he could have done to help Ben, but maybe he could have been a distraction – he is incredibly good at stealing attention, so Reginald and Luther and Allison like to remind him. He could have tried, if nothing else.

But the thing is; he tries now. When he can stomach it, he lets withdrawals continue until Ben is solid in front of him, his voice clearer, and they talk a bit. Klaus apologises profusely, and Ben is sad and neither of them know what to say.

Klaus brings it up at breakfast the next day. Shaking from withdrawals, eyes bloodshot and lined by shadows, he places his hands on the table and stands up and says; “Ben is here. I can see him.”

“ _Klaus_ ,” Luther snaps, hand tight around his fork.

“I can see him, Luther!” Klaus defends. “He’s right there! Ben is right there!”

“You can’t see Ben because you’re always high, Klaus,” Luther growls. “We know that. Would you just give it up? It’s not even been a week-“

“I’m not fucking high right now, Luther,” Klaus hisses.

“Number Four,” snaps Reginald, his voice cold and sharp and it strikes Klaus to his core and makes him bite his tongue. “You know I do not tolerate talking over food, let alone such foul language, and nor will I encourage this kind of childish behaviour.”

Klaus’ jaw drops. “I’m not lying!” He exclaims. “I’m not even high! I can see the ghosts now, and I can see Ben right here-“

“Number Four you are all too aware with the consequences of such talk right now,” Reginald continues, finally, finally looking up from his breakfast to fix a cold stare on Klaus. “Your irrational fear prohibits you from using your powers to their capabilities and the poison you pump yourself full of has made you delusional-“

“ _Dad_ -“

“Number Six has passed on and will rest, and you will not use his name to garner sympathy for yourself and what you have done for yourself, nor will it garner you the attention you so desperately seek. Now, Number Four, sit down and be silent, and perhaps this will serve as a turning point for you and you will take it to hone your powers and maybe one day you will be able to conjure the ghost of Number Six, or you will be in my office after breakfast for your consequences and you will inevitably return to your shameful habits.”

Klaus’ jaw tics, anger and disbelief flooding him, and he looks over his siblings for some form of support; they know he can see ghosts when he’s sober, they should believe him. But Diego averts his gaze, and Allison shakes her head, and Luther glares openly at him. They don’t believe him.

Klaus slams his hands onto the table, shaking his cutlery and dishes, and then he storms out and leaves the Academy.

It is Ben, sometime later, who explains things a little to Klaus while they sit in a motel room bought by the money from Reginald’s golfing trophy. Their conversations are often awkward and stilted; Klaus ignores Ben for the most part, because Klaus hates seeing the way blood spills between his fingers and trails behind them and how his guts glisten wetly, but sometimes they talk.

The others, Ben included before his death, do not understand the ghosts. They do not understand the idea that the ghosts are always there – it isn’t a matter of being too high to _see_ them, it is a matter of being too high to _conjure_ them. If he isn’t high, they assume he sees no ghosts but has the ability to bring them to him if he so wishes. If he is high, he cannot bring ghosts to him.

Klaus thinks that if they simply listened to him, they would understand. Klaus uses the word _see_ and they use the word _conjure_. They have their own idea of his powers and refuse to acknowledge it is truly different. They think they know better than him.

Part of it, he realises, is likely due to Reginald. Of course he would drive that idea into them, too, but he had expected Diego, at least, to believe him.

In the end, he tells himself it doesn’t matter. He can see Ben, he knows how his powers work (even if he doesn’t understand why it takes so much to not see Ben, more than it takes for the other ghosts to disappear) and they don’t. Their opinions don’t matter. He leaves the academy and doesn’t look back.

Ben is a peculiar thing. Unlike the other ghosts, his form begins to… clean up. It takes months to do, but the blood slows, the stains leave, his clothes change. Over the years, unlike the other ghosts, he ages, too. It confuses Klaus to no end. He has no idea how Ben works and it scares him, really. The seed of doubt planted in his mind by his own family grows and grows, though he never confronts it.

He runs into his siblings over the years. Diego and Vanya, mostly. Luther whenever he breaks into the academy to steal, or if the weather is bad enough and he doesn’t want to freeze on the streets. Sometimes Luther kicks him out, sometimes he gives him an empty look and keeps walking. He never sees Allison; she is too good to see him, too good to even tell Klaus about her daughter or to invite him to her wedding. He sees it on magazine covers and on televisions in shop windows; pictures of her and her husband, all dressed up and gorgeous. He sees one photo, and Luther is there, and Vanya, and even Diego. Klaus pretends it doesn’t hurt; he wouldn’t want himself at a wedding, either.

Diego, though, he sees often. Diego lets him crash in his place sometimes, until he gets too annoyed with Klaus. He picks him up from hospital and rehab, until he can’t deal with Klaus’ overdoses and relapses any more. Klaus is hesitant to bring Ben up again, old wounds of being disbelieved in front of Reginald still aching, but sometimes he is too high or drunk to control his mouth and to remember that he cannot talk to Ben in front of others.

The reactions he gets are varied. Sometimes Diego simply ignores him, sometimes Diego just stares at him with a sad look. When Klaus is having a particularly bad day and can’t remember what he’s said as soon as it has fallen from his tongue and is typically insisting to Diego that he can see Ben, really, he was never lying about that, _he’s there right now_ , Diego gets angry with him.

“ _It isn’t funny,”_ Diego had once snapped _. “It’s not fucking f-funny, Klaus, why can’t you just stop it? It’s not a joke. You said yourself you can’t conjure any ghosts when you’re high and you – just stop, Klaus. Stop dragging Ben’s name into things.”_

He hates Diego’s anger, but Diego is always angry and it is familiar. He can deal with anger easier. What he hates, however, are the few times he had ever spoken to Vanya or Allison about it, or slipped up in front of them.

Allison, unwilling to be seen with him for too long, giving him a bitter smile with cold eyes. _“We all miss him, Klaus. And seeing Luther when he came home that day must have been hard. You can’t expect that image not to stick in your head, and you can’t expect drugs to not mess with your head. If you ever decide to accept help for once and try to be better, then I know a therapist that can help with that. But you need to accept what you’re seeing isn’t Ben, and you need to move on.”_

Vanya had pretended to empathise with him, slightly. As much as she was capable of doing when she refused to allow any of them too close to her, but her true thoughts had come out with her book, and she hadn’t held anything back.

_“Ben’s death had been hard on us all. Luther had been there to witness it and Klaus had been there to see Luther return with his body, and from that day on he had always claimed to be able to see our brother’s ghost, yet would also claim that the drugs he abused stopped his ability to conjure the dead. He would lie to our faces about being able to see our brother and talk to him, and I was mad, then. Klaus stooped low for attention, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. Now, I just pity him. With years of drug abuse mixing with his guilty conscience, he convinced himself he could see Ben’s ghost. I can only hope one day he realises Ben has long moved on and it is only his own head.”_

It would be a lie to say that those interactions with his sisters hadn’t hit him. Because, worst of all; they made sense, and he knew it.

He can’t see ghosts when he is high. Perhaps he had seen him in the kitchen that day, just before the pills reached their peak, and maybe that had truly been his ghost, but perhaps his brother had truly moved on after his funeral and his mind, seven years deep into drug addiction and eleven years deep into alcohol abuse, had latched desperately onto that image of his corpse and the guilt of not being there to help and the need to make up for it by using his powers, and that the Ben who has haunted his side since his death truly was not his brother, not his ghost, but simply his broken, cruel mind struggling to cope with everything he has been through.

When Klaus' mind is fried by drugs and he doesn't recognise where he is or who the people him are, he does recognise Ben. When he is on his back in an alleyway and trembling with a bad high, Ben sits by his side. When he had sat outside at night, with no money, no food, no shelter and nothing to his name except the shame of his past and present, Ben had been there for him. Without Ben, he knows he wouldn't have been able to keep pushing through, and whether or not Ben is a ghost or a desperate need for comfort, Klaus takes it.

That doubt with Ben only ever grows over the years, but Ben remains nonetheless, and won’t leave no matter what Klaus does, and on the streets it is so nice to have his brother’s support when he has nothing else, and Klaus is selfish and keeps his brother with him. He never mentions it to the others when he sees them again. He doesn’t confront the idea that Ben truly might just be a simple hallucination, but it remains in the back of his mind, a beaten down thought that he doesn’t want to accept or know the truth behind it.

His siblings think either Klaus simply truly only used Ben for attention, or that he has managed to mess his head up enough to hallucinate his brother and use him as some sort of coping mechanism. And Klaus truly doesn’t know if they are wrong or not. He isn’t sure he wants to know, either. It hurts to look at Ben and think that he is just a figment of his imagination, a part of his mind wracked by grief and guilt and doesn’t know how to cope with it and so it made him this instead.

He doesn’t know and he tries not to think about it. Not until the day he is pulling drugs out of his stuffed animal in his old bedroom at the Academy, trying to numb the pain of Dave’s death, and Ben punches him. His head snaps to the side and his brain staggers, trying to catch up with what just happened, and Ben stands just as shocked, staring at his own hands. His jaw aches with pain and he ghosts one hand over the fiery spot Ben punched, proof that it had actually happened.

“How – how did you do that?” Klaus asks, tone awed, and Ben lifts his gaze from his hands to stare at Klaus, and the shock in his expression reminds him of that day in the kitchen when Klaus first saw him, covered in his own blood and confused.

“I think _you_ did that,” Ben says, oblivious to Klaus’ internal conflict. It is Klaus’ powers that allowed Ben to be corporeal; that can then make ghosts corporeal. After all this time, after all the doubts, Ben is standing in front of him, and he is really there. His brother is real, and has actually been by his side.

It makes something painful and warm bubble up in his chest. When he has been at his lowest and Ben was the only thing getting him through it, it wasn’t some desperate attempt for comfort created by his own mind.

It hits him now, all of those emotions and thoughts he had swallowed down for years. The guilt and the grief and the fear, and now it is too much for him to push it aside again. He stares at Ben, his mouth dry and throat tight, and with a hesitant hand he reaches out to try and touch his arm, and his breath hitches when it does.

“Klaus?” Ben says, voice soft, like the day in the kitchen, and Klaus thinks about the way he had stood silent as Reginald yelled at him over the table during breakfast, and the way he would look at Klaus after one of their siblings told him to stop lying about Ben.

With an aching jaw and stinging eyes, Klaus throws his arms around Ben while he can and when they fall through one another a few seconds later, Ben’s form cold and ghostly once more, Klaus wears a wide grin and he laughs. After a moment, Ben joins in too, sounding more alive than he has in a long time.


End file.
